♓ Pisces

Pisces is the ocean of the zodiac: boundless, compassionate and porous. It dissolves the edges between self and everything, for better and worse.

Pisces at a glance

• DatesFebruary 19 – March 20
• ElementWater
• ModalityMutable
• Ruling planetJupiter (modern Neptune)
• PolarityNegative
• ArchetypeThe Mystic / The Dreamer

Pisces dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Pisces from about 19 February to 20 March. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Pisces and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Pisces is like

Pisces is the last sign and it has been through the other eleven. Whatever is in front of it, some part of the sign has already imagined being the person doing it. That is where the compassion comes from, and it is where the tiredness comes from too.

The boundaries are genuinely thin. A Pisces walking into a room takes on the temperature of the room, and can spend the whole afternoon carrying a mood it did not arrive with and cannot trace.

And it does not resolve things so much as dissolve them. Where another sign would argue a contradiction out, Pisces holds both halves at once. That is useless in a negotiation and it is the only way to make art, or to sit with somebody through the worst week of their life.

Mutable water. It takes the shape of the container, and it wears the container away.

In the body, Pisces is linked to the feet and the immune system.

What it costs

Being this porous has no off switch, and the sign is often last to work out which of the feelings in the room belongs to it.

And it is very good at exits. Not the dramatic ones especially: the small daily kind, where the difficult conversation becomes a lovely afternoon and nobody notices the conversation did not happen.

Weakness is the wrong word for it. The same permeability that makes a bad week overwhelming is exactly what lets somebody feel understood by you inside ninety seconds. It is one faculty, not a virtue and a fault.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

One placement of ten, and the softest of them still has nine others standing behind it.

The Moon carries a sign of its own, and after it Mercury, Venus and Mars. A Pisces Sun with a Capricorn Moon feels all of it and shows up anyway. A chart lists what you were given. What you did with it is not in there.

Born with the Sun in Pisces

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Pisces at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Pisces sits in your chart, whatever your sign

The twelve signs leave nobody out. Pisces has a house in your chart whether or not anything is standing in it.

Traditionally it is read as the room with no door at all. Find yours, and notice where things get in and out of you without asking.

Pisces on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Pisces rising sign, a different placement from a Pisces Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Pisces season, in the sky

Pisces is the last sign and it ends at the March equinox, the point the whole tropical zodiac is measured from. Where Pisces stops, 0 degrees of Aries begins and the count starts over.

There is a real coincidence sitting on that point. The equinox itself currently stands in the constellation Pisces, and has done since roughly the first century, so the origin of the entire system is presently among this sign's own stars. It is drifting, a degree every seventy-two years, and it will leave. For now the zodiac's zero is in the Fishes.

Jupiter and Neptune, the sign's rulers

Pisces has two rulers. Jupiter held it before Neptune was found in 1846, and Jupiter is the generous half: the breadth, the faith, the willingness to believe there is more of a thing than there appears to be.

Neptune is the dissolving half, and it is the slowest of them all: about 165 years for one circuit, fourteen to a sign. Read your Jupiter for what you trust. Read your Neptune for where the edges go.

Pisces compatibility

Pisces with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Pisces also touches

dreams, art, spirituality, escape, compassion, the unconscious, sacrifice, oneness.

A question to sit with

Where do you lose yourself in others, and what would coming home to you feel like?